Our modern understanding of gravity comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which stands as one of the best-tested theories in science. General relativity predicted many phenomena ...

Our knowledge of the events and forces that shaped the early Universe is dependent on our ability to understand the most extreme conditions. On one hand, the Universe’s origin was incomprehensibly ...

Matter and energy are the two basic components of the entire Universe. An enormous challenge for scientists is that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible and the source of most of the energy ...

For the first 380,000 years or so after the Big Bang, the entire universe was a hot soup of particles and photons, too dense for light to travel very far. However, as the cosmos expanded, it cooled ...

Galaxies are home to most of the stars in the universe, and they form the beads of the cosmic jewelry that defines structure on the largest scales. But galaxies haven’t always been around, and they ...

The Milky Way is our galactic home, part of the story of how we came to be. Astronomers have learned that it’s a large spiral galaxy, similar to many others, but also different in ways that reflect ...

The physical processes involved in galaxy formation and evolution form an incredibly complex puzzle, operating at a extraordinary scale. Scientists at the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) ...

Large galaxies like the Milky Way formed out of mergers with smaller galaxies and by stealing some of their stars. Astronomers discovered that as many as 25% of galaxies are currently merging with ...

The universe began 13.8 billion years ago, and in its early years, it looked completely different than it does now. For nearly 400,000 years, the entire cosmos was opaque, which means we have no ...

Supernovas are some of the brightest events in the universe, occasionally outshining entire galaxies at their peak. Many supernovas can be seen from billions of light-years away, and nearby supernovas ...

How We Search. Exoplanets, or planets in solar systems other than our own, sometimes orbit directly between the Earth and their host star.When the planet orbits in front of its star, it blocks a small ...

Black holes are some of the most fascinating and mind-bending objects in the cosmos. The very thing that characterizes a black hole also makes it hard to study: its intense gravity. All the mass in a ...